[This was posted last week on Hit Coffee. I meant to cross-post it here, but forgot to.]
So I was listening to this John Grisham audiobook. It was very much unlike any other Grisham book I have ever read/heard before. It was like a series of random vignettes. One minute, it’s talking about the old owner of the local paper. The next, it’s from the point of view of its new owner. He’s having dinner with someone and the food is being described. He’s on the witness stand explaining how he bought the paper. Someone else is on the witness stand being asked if he knew his wife was cheating on it. I have no idea what the hell the trial is about, but whatever. The narrator is flashing back to having just arrived in the town and being pulled over by a haberdasher. Then a sniper is killing people.
WHAT THE HELL?!
The player was on Random Track Play. That’s what.
The weird thing is that there’s an actual literary genre of that non-linear style. It sucks, too, but cool New Yorkers got bored with good storytelling or something.
Hehe.
My first novel actually went this route, interestingly enough. It was, however, as clear as possible about the order of events. Pretty much everything that happens is summarized early on and a timeline is provided. The book is about watching it all unfold. The time jumps bring varying linkages between events that occur years apart. One leading to another, patterns laid on top of one another, and so on.
If I ever go back and clean it up, it’ll involve taking a hatchet to a lot of it (waaaay too long, too many characters, etc.). The format, though, wouldn’t work any other way. There aren’t many stories that this is really the case for, I don’t think.
I didn’t realize it was an actual genre (or maybe, in 1996, it wasn’t). It was actually inspired by Watchmen #4.
In the genre, no timeline is provided. Much, although not all, of the purpose is to move beyond the concept of linearity. They want to avoid imposing a sense of order on the story, and leave it open to the reader, not foreclosing alternative interpretations. In practice I find it unbearable. But the approach of your novel, I think, coud work very well. And FWIW, one of my favorite movies is Memento, which has a very fractured timeline, but with the purpose of helping the viewer identify with the main character.
it’s a technique, not a genre.
I would upgrade technique to “literary style,” but you’re correct, genre was a bad word choice on my part.
Memento’s timeline is actually very neatly structured. It’s just that you don’t know that the first time you watch it, so WTF’s ensue.
I’ve seen Memento 5 times and I’m still trying to work it out.
It was actually inspired by Watchmen #4.
You were feeling blue?
Only in color, Michael.
30 seconds from now, you’re going to patronize me, and I’ll get angry.
You’re mad at me?
Not yet.
Naked Power Lunch.
Instead of baboons, we get geckos missing the apple and hitting his wife, all done with a decidingly Australian accent.
One of the Dadaists’ tricks was to create a new story by cutting an existing one into pieces and pulling them out of a hat in random order, which is more or less what your player did. And the first two section of The Sound and The Fury are the internal monologues of an idiot [1] and a suicidally depressed obsessive, neither of them at all linear. So this stuff goes way back.
1. Hence the title, of course.
Funny you should mention The Sound and The Fury, which I threw across the room in frustration when I tried to read it. (I knew nothing of it, and had picked it up to read in the hopes of telling myself I was the kind of well-read sophisticate who had read The Sound and The Fury.) It came at the heels of my similarly-abortive attempt at reading Ulysses, and made me despair of 20th century literature. Telling someone of the experience some time later, I was told that the first chapter is told from the perspective of the idiot man-child and the whole book isn’t like that.
I finally made it through Ulysses, and now that I know about the structure of The Sound and The Fury I’ll probably give it another try.
have you read as i lay dying? it’s a lot more accessible.
ulysses is kinda hard on people not into irish catholic life at the turn of the century. and by kinda hard i mean really, really hard. i live with a joyce scholar so if you ever have any questions and/or want to die from a torrent of facts you neither asked for nor expected, let me know.
Someone with whom I was once acquainted compared Ulysses (which I can, at best, appreciate but certainly did not love) to Infinite Jest (which I love unabashedly). She said that the latter will be just as inscrutable as the former to anyone not intimately familiar with turn-of-the-millennium American society. Since I know essentially nothing of early 20th-century Dublin or Irish Catholicism, Ulysses was an extended meditation on “WTF???!?” for me.
it’s funnier if you’re of a catholic background because you* get all the jokes that bloom’s crypto jew is making, and the catechism parody in the ithica chapter is probably the standout comedic moment. (anyone who has stumbled around their house after a night of drinking can appreciate it) it might be enjoyable as an expression of the first real cinematic novel – if you think of the narrative arc as being a floating camera – but i really only recommend dubliners to people, which are far more digestable. i like portrait a lot, probably my favorite bildungsroman, and the backdrop of a child trying to understand the political and economic realities in which the adults are dragging him through is pretty universal, but the specifics are just old enough to be incomprehensible without a little wikipedia-ing.
having never gotten very far into infinite jest i can’t speak of the comparison, but it tends to be a problem with any literature. and literature is just old enough now to have some really alien stuff in it. without any context, don quixote is just a hobo in a funny costume who lost his dang mind, even if the theme of someone drowning in fantasy is incredibly/distressingly fresh today.
i second mr. schilling on the ultrafresh dopeness of faulkner, though i disagree with his application of the term pretentious. even among smartypants in america – a generally applicable label for the loog folk, i think – the fear that someone is looking down on us/we’re looking down on someone is damn near omnipresent. which is hella lame, but whatevs.
* in theory!
It’s going to sound pretentious, but TSatF is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. There’s a fifth section, not part of the original book, that Faulkner wrote for The Portable Faulkner (a “best of” anthology that helped bring Faulkner’s work back from eclipse when most of it was out of print), that’s included in most editions, either as a prologue or an epilogue. It outlines the characters and the story in much more conventional style, so if you give it another try, you might start with that.
You may be interested to know that I read Mountain Victory at your suggestion. Elegaic and haunting, to be sure, but I would have a hard time agreeing with you that it was beautiful. What Faulkner depicted was either pathetic (meaning it elicited pathos), or ugly to the point of approaching grotesquerie.
Pathos is fair. What I admire about the story (and Faulkner’s writing in general) is that even the least sympathetic characters, the ones approaching grotesquerie (and compared to some of his other writing, Mountain Victory doesn’t approach it closely) have a reality and integrity to them. Their actions make sense given who they are. Given Faulkner’s mostly tragic view of the world, generally with awful results.
Oh, and because this is Faulkner, Saucier Weddell’s death was not just a personal tragedy but also the end of his lineage. “Lo”, a much lighter story, portrays the Weddells in better times.
I was told that the first chapter is told from the perspective of the idiot man-child and the whole book isn’t like that.
Yeah, the second chapter’s not quite so coherent 🙂
Hopefully Russell has a high tolerance for run-on sentences and isn’t a fan of punctuation.
I am not a superfan of stream-of-consciousness writing. However, I can power through it if I have a glimmer that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.